Elon and Trump fly to Beijing 🇨🇳

Welcome back to the Technology newsletter 🤖

President Trump spent the back half of this week in Beijing with a 16-CEO entourage (Tim Cook, Elon Musk, Jensen Huang and BlackRock's Larry Fink all in tow) and Xi Jinping told them China is going to "open wider" to American business.

Plus, GTA 6 pre-orders are about to drop, Cisco is cutting nearly 4,000 jobs to pour more money into AI, Figure's humanoid robots just worked a full 8-hour warehouse shift on their own, and more…

Let's get into it 👇

🎮 A leaked Best Buy affiliate email surfaced Thursday showing GTA 6 pre-orders will open Monday, May 18, and run through May 21 (when Take-Two Interactive holds a big investor call). Insider Gaming independently verified the email is real. That timing has fans convinced Rockstar will drop the long-awaited third official trailer on or around May 18. The game itself is still set to launch November 19 on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, but as of next week, you can finally put money down. It’s been 13 years since GTA 5 released, which helps make this the most anticipated game release in history, and the wait is finally over.

💼 Cisco said Thursday it will cut just under 4,000 jobs (about 5% of its workforce) as part of a restructuring meant to free up cash for AI infrastructure, chips, and security. The networking giant also reported record quarterly revenue of $15.8 billion and said it has already booked $5.3 billion in AI infrastructure orders this year, with a full-year target of $9 billion (up from $5 billion). The stock jumped roughly 15% on the news. It's the latest example of a Big Tech company laying off people while spending billions more on AI. Cisco is having an excellent first half of 2026… just not if you work there.

🍏 Apple is working on a way to allow autonomous AI "agents" (apps that can take actions on your behalf, like booking flights or filing expense reports) into the App Store without breaking its strict privacy and security rules. This is bit of a surprising move, as agents are inherently messy and unpredictable, and Apple's whole model is keeping the platform tightly controlled. Reporters expect Apple may announce a framework for it at WWDC in less than a month, and what they say will shed some light on their direction in AI projects. It would be a significant pivot for a company whose AI strategy has so far been the slow lane of Big Tech.

📞 Motorola opened pre-orders Thursday on its 2026 Razr family, which for the first time includes a full book-style foldable. There are four phones in total: the base Razr at $799, the Razr+ at $1,099, the premium Razr Ultra at $1,499, and the new Razr Fold at $1,899. All four have dual 50-megapixel cameras, bigger batteries thanks to new silicon-carbon cells, and ship to customers on May 21. The reviews so far are mixed enough that 9to5Google's verdict was basically "open, but wait." The foldables race just got a new contestant, but let’s see if the new boss is the same as the old boss.

📤 Meta launched a new Incognito Chat mode this week that lets you talk to its AI assistant inside WhatsApp and the Meta AI app without anything being saved. No logs on Meta's servers, no record on your phone, and the messages disappear when you close the chat. Mark Zuckerberg called it the first major AI product where conversations aren't stored at all. The launch comes as OpenAI faces lawsuits over stored chat logs being subpoenaed in court, and just days after Meta quietly removed end-to-end encryption from Instagram DMs: a sequence the EFF called a "broken promise." Hard to disagree.

🧑‍⚖ The marquee tech trial of the year went to closing arguments Thursday in Oakland, capping weeks of testimony in Elon Musk's lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman. Musk's lawyers told the jury that Altman betrayed the original nonprofit charter Musk helped fund; Altman countered that Musk had "tried to kill" OpenAI and launched a competitor in xAI. Musk himself skipped closing arguments to be on Trump's plane to China, and his lawyer publicly apologized for his absence. The jury starts deliberating Monday, and we’re on the edge of our seats in the meantime.

🤖 Figure AI livestreamed its humanoid robots sorting packages on a conveyor belt for eight hours straight this week, with the company saying its new Helix-02 model is matching human speed (around three seconds per package) without any human supervision. It's one of the splashiest demos yet of so-called "physical AI." Plenty of researchers are skeptical. TechRadar noted critics on social media questioning whether the run was as fully autonomous as advertised. But, if it holds up, it's a real milestone for what these robots can actually do in a working environment… and a real gamechanger for factory labor.

🚀 After two weather scrubs earlier this week, NASA and SpaceX are now targeting tonight at 6:05 p.m. Eastern for the launch of the 34th Cargo Dragon mission to the International Space Station. The capsule is carrying some fascinating stuff: about 6,500 pounds of crew supplies and science experiments (including a wood-based bone scaffold meant to one day help treat osteoporosis, and equipment to study how red blood cells change in microgravity). It's also the sixth flight for this particular Dragon capsule, a record for any SpaceX cargo ship.

President Trump spent the back half of this week in Beijing on a state visit, and the most striking thing about the trip wasn't necessarily anything Trump or Xi Jinping said, it was who was on the plane with him.

Trump brought a 16-person delegation of American CEOs whose combined net worth push close to $1 trillion, including:

Musk's appearance at a state banquet inside the Great Hall of the People on Thursday raised eyebrows in part because he was supposed to be in court in Oakland that same day for closing arguments in his lawsuit against OpenAI.

The headline takeaway from Xi was a public pledge that China will "open wider" to American business.

He framed cooperation as the only path forward, told the CEOs that he wanted to "stabilize and develop" the U.S.-China economic relationship, and rolled out an unusually warm reception.

Huang, who was a last-minute addition to the trip, called the summit "one of the most important meetings in human history," a quote that, depending on your taste, is either a sign of how high the stakes are or how much Nvidia needs this deal to work.

Reuters and CNBC reported that during the visit, the U.S. government quietly cleared roughly ten Chinese tech companies (including Alibaba, Tencent, ByteDance, and JD.com) to buy Nvidia's H200 AI chips, on the condition that the U.S. Treasury takes a 25% cut of the sales.

What makes the trip newsworthy beyond the optics is what it reveals about how thoroughly U.S. tech still depends on China, and vice versa.

For nearly a decade, Washington has been pushing a policy of "decoupling": tariffs, export controls, friend-shoring chip production to Arizona and Taiwan, and a quieter pressure campaign on companies like Apple to move iPhone assembly out of mainland China.

But Cook still makes most of his iPhones there, and Tesla's biggest factory by output is in Shanghai.

Nvidia's most advanced chips are blocked from Chinese customers by the very export rules that the White House is now poking holes in.

The CEOs in that delegation weren't there to wave flags. They were there because, even with billions in U.S. subsidies and tariff threats hanging over the relationship, none of their businesses works the way investors expect it to without access to China.

The unresolved question is whether the trip actually changes anything on either side.

Xi has made versions of the "open wider" pledge before, and as of Thursday night Beijing hadn't actually signed off on the H200 sales it would need to approve on its end.

American policymakers, especially in Congress, are likely to bristle at the idea that the U.S. is loosening AI chip controls just as China keeps subsidizing its own domestic chip industry to try to surpass Nvidia.

And the CEOs got a lot of warm words, but few concrete concessions on the things that actually constrain their China business: data localization rules, app store restrictions, and EV market access.

For now, the world's two biggest economies are deeply, awkwardly entangled, and even an administration that ran on decoupling spent this week reminding everyone exactly how much American tech still has riding on Beijing's good will.